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Thursday, January 10, 2008

One Laptop per childish adult

My XO Laptop has arrived. After a short detour via Austin, TX (thanks for ordering it for me, big cousin) and almost three weeks of United States Postal Service limbo it finally is mine. (Okay, the German customs had some fun with it which allowed me to sit in their Berlin office for almost 2 hours and watch the painfully slow processing of my packet. Think as east block style agency meeting slow motion village post office. Only slower. Finally I could have it for only 18 Euros of tax after convincing them it was a gift as well as a toy.)

Of all the 400 color combinations of the logo I of course received the one clashing most with the laptop’s green plastic: mint and sort-of dark green, both quite off the main hue, ah well. I’ll learn to love it.

It doesn’t look as small as it is next to my 12″ Powerbook, most likely because the Powerbook is not so big to begin with.

This is more accurate although I may have extraordinarily big or small hands, so maybe it is not so informative as a picture.

So what am I planning to do with it except for showing off? First, there are some interesting programs (”activities”) already installed, the most interesting being the TamTam SynthLab, a Max/MSP based visual synthesizer modeler. Here’s a video of SynthLab in action. There is another activity called Measure which is a very simple oscilloscope. The XO’s audio input accepts a wider range of voltages compared to regular  computer soundcards, so it can be used as a flexible A/D converter.

A lot of improving and hacking of the XO is currently done and all over the web. Some people want to increase the analog input’s versatility by a usb powered probe circuit to enhance the oscilloscope range. On the software side, because the XO runs on an adapted Linux distribution (with custom “Sugar” interface), we’ll certainly see a lot of applications being built for it in the near future. About 80,000 laptops were sold to individuals like me, so a lot of them are now in the hands of hackers and tinkerers.

And finally, the XO may have a lot of differences to regular laptop computers, but in the end it is a computer by design, so even if development for its regular system stalled, there will be someone putting together a special Ubuntu distro. So, no worries that this system cannot be used for something in the end. It does already run Doom.